


Culture Shock

by jenny_of_oldstones



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Apostate Inquisitor, Hinterlands (Dragon Age), M/M, Mages and Templars, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-04 22:46:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12781245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_of_oldstones/pseuds/jenny_of_oldstones
Summary: Dorian wished someone had warned him about southern Templars.





	Culture Shock

Blame it on Tevinter arrogance. As a boy, his instructors had taught him only that southern Templars drank lyirum, cancelled magic, and had a cheeky penchant for manhandling mages. He supposed some part of him had assumed that, when faced with a real mage—a mage of Imperium talent and breeding— a southern Templar’s abilities would collapse like a house of cards, and they'd fall as easily as any other mundane to his Maker-given might.

He really wished someone had warned him.

Dorian volleyed a fireball across the field. It came whistling down and splattered across the Templar’s breastplate like water. The Templar walked through the smoke and clanged his sword against his shield, his advance undeterred.

 _Monsters_. That was the only word that sprang to Dorian’s mind. _Absolute monsters._ He set his staff across his lap and heaved himself backwards with both hands up the steep slope of a hillside, dragging his bloody left leg through the grass.

The ambush had happened so quickly that he wasn’t sure what had struck him. The flurry of Templar blades that had descended upon the Herald and his party in what had been a quiet corner of the Hinterlands had made it difficult to keep track of whom was cutting who. He hadn’t even realized he’d been wounded until he fled through the trees to the nearest clearing and his knee gave out.

He liked to think he would have stood a chance, otherwise.

“A little help?” Dorian shouted. “Anyone?” He crawled back another pace and sat down. His fingers, slippery with sweat, pawed at a pouch on his travel belt. He tugged out a tiny vial and pulled the cork out with his teeth. The lyrium swept down his throat like cold fire, shivering life into his limbs.

If the Templar was concerned about this, he did not show it. He continued unhurriedly, his sword loose in his hand, as calm and relaxed as if he was out for a midday stroll.

 _He’s killed a hundred mages just like you, Pavus._ Dorian’s staff trembled in his hands. _Do you think anyone will be able to tell your body apart from the other rat-eaten corpses you’ve come across today?_

“Put a little ice in your drink, you bastard!” Dorian swung his staff down and slammed the focus stone against the ground. A spear of ice splintered across the dirt and crusted over the Templar like living frost. For a split second, Dorian dared to hope.

And then the Templar jerked his shoulder forward, and the ice crumbled around him.

Before he could attack again, the Templar raised a hand. "Enough."

An invisible force knocked him onto his back. The breath crushed out of his lungs, and every part of his body screamed in violation and horror. He reached for magic, for fire, lightning, for anything to make it stop—

And found nothing.

He tried again.

His magic was gone.

Nothing in his life had prepared him for this.

For as long as he could remember, his magic had been a constant like air, everywhere, all around him for him to breathe in and claim if he wished it.

For it to no longer be there was like being suffocated.

“How does it feel, Tevinter?” asked the Templar.

Dorian couldn’t answer. The world was hard and unforgiving as a cracked riverbed. There was nothing to grasp and nowhere to pull from. The Veil that had teemed and brushed against his soul all his life had been ripped down like a cheap curtain.

He made a flimsy swing with his staff. The Templar knocked it away with his shield and slammed his boot down on his knee. White hot pain lanced behind Dorian’s eyes, and he screamed.

“How does it feel—” The Templar ground his heel into the wound. “—to be just like everyone else?”

The boot disappeared, and Dorian laughed. “If this is what it's like to be you, then I truly have my pity, you generic, dull-brained hypocrite.”

The Templar tilted his head at that. Then he raised his sword.

A blur of blue light zigzagged across the clearing. Something heavy crashed against the side of the Templar's head. His helm crushed inward and twisted sideways. The Templar shouted and dropped his sword, his fingers scrabbling at the leather ties. He unbuckled one and tugged the helmet up to expose a slice of pale, white throat. 

Trevelyan loomed behind him.

His staff was in his hands. Its focus stone was a weighted sphere of marble, cracked from where it had struck the Templar's helm. At the other end was a long, thin blade. 

He plunged it into the Templar’s throat. 

“What took you so long?” shouted Dorian. He yanked his feet back before the body fell on them.

“Stay down," said Trevelyan.

“But-“

“I said, stay down.”

Dorian soon saw why. Across the clearing, another Templar was running. She raised her blade above her head and spun it in a wide circle, pulling all energy toward herself. What magic remained in the clearing scattered.

If Trevelyan was alarmed by this, he didn’t show it.  

“Maleficar!” The woman crouched behind her shield and charged.

Trevelyan dodged out of the way. The sword whistled through the air where he’d stood a moment before. 

“Stand and face me, mage.” The Templar rounded on him. Her heavy plate clinked and clattered. “Face me.”

She slashed at him. Again, Trevelyan slid away. He circled her, calmly, forcing her to turn in place to keep him in sight. 

The whole time, he staff blade remained pointed at the dirt. 

It was with slow calculation that he, at last, raised it and made a thrust at her head. The Templar swatted it away with her shield. Trevelyan made another stab, and the blade glanced off the thick plate of her gorget, screeching harmlessly off the metal.  

The pattern repeated like a dance. The Templar would lunge, and Trevelyan would dodge and circle. Every now and then his blade flicked out, testing and probing the armor.

Dorian gripped his own staff in dread. He may not have fared well in his first encounter with a southern Templar, but he had trained against northern Templars enough to know how badly a ranged weapon fared against a knight in plate. Trevelyan might be swift and cunning, but he was lightly armored in a mage’s duster, and all it would take was one mistake for the Templar to get inside his range, and then it would all be over.

Dorian couldn’t claim to know the man, but it would be more than a little embarrassing if Andraste’s Herald died after all the fuss made about him. Nevermind before he got a chance to seal the Breach.

But the Templar was moving slower.

"COWARD!” The Templar swung and missed. The sword in her hand came down again, neither as fast nor as high as before. She faltered, her knee trembling, and for a moment she struggled to regain her balance.

Trevelyan struck.

This time, his staff was too quick to follow. It punctured through mail and leather at the joint at the elbow. Blood wet through the links in the mail, and the Templar gave a groan. Trevelyan jerked his blade out and backed away.

The Templar shook her injured arm. With a curse, she slung her shield off into the dirt.

Trevelyan didn’t give her time to recover. He staff flashed, stabbing now at weak points in the armor.

Behind the knee, under the ankle, between the gorget and the helmet. The Templar batted at him with her sword, panting audibly behind her helm, while blood freely and wet the grass between her feet.

 _Yes_. Dorian grasped a low tree branch and tugged himself up.  _Cut her to little pieces._

There was movement to his left, through the trees. A third Templar was creeping through the undergrowth, a short bow aimed at Trevelyan’s back.

That wouldn’t do. Dorian picked up a rock and chucked it. It hit the Templar in the helmet with a dull _clang_. His bow swung around and pointed at Dorian instead.

 _Oh, damn._ Dorian scrambled through the grass. He gave up crawling and rolled down the slope instead, an arrow thudding in the dirt behind him. The Templar hopped and skidded down the hillside after him, drawing an arrow from his quiver as he went.

The slope ended abruptly and Dorian came to rest on his belly. His knee screamed in agony, and without any choice in the matter, he curled up on himself.

A moment later, an arrow thwacked into the grass next to his head.

“ _Kaffas_.” He scrambled upright and pawed around. No stones. No branches. Nothing to defend himself with at all. 

It would have likely ended there, if the Herald hadn’t strode up behind the archer.

With the workman ease of a shepherd catching a sheep, Trevelyan grabbed the Templar by the neck. He threw him down in a clangor of armor and pinned his legs to the ground with one knee and crushed his free arm with the other. The Templar struggled, and Dorian could just see his eyes through the slit of his helm, wide with outrage and disbelief.

Trevelyan unsheathed a knife and cut the buckles of the Templar’s helm and flung it away. Then he gripped the Templar by the hair, tugged his head back, and slit his throat. It was over so quickly that Dorian felt a spasm of shock. He watched, numb, as Trevelyan used the man’s own Chantry patterned skirt to wipe the blood off the blade.

An bird tweeted in the canopy above them. Trevelyan’s hauled Dorian up and sat him down on a nearby log.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

"An astute observation,” said Dorian, slightly delirious. Now that the whole mess was over, her was more than a little embarrassed at how badly he’d needed to be saved. “That was neatly done, by the by.”

Trevelyan knelt down and examined the blood flowing from his knee.

“You’re used to this sort of thing, I take it?” asked Dorian. “Taking down barbarian religious fanatics?”

Trevelyan ignored the question. "Do you know how to quarterstaff?”

“Of course.” Dorian had trained with a staff since he had learned to walk. “I would have had an easier time of it if not for my leg.”

"Hmmmm.”

"I would have,” said Dorian, annoyed. “I’ve trained against Templars, you know. Just not ones with insane magic-cancelling powers.” He beat a fist against the log in disgust. “Maker’s breath, what is wrong with you people? Keeping animals like that on the Chantry’s leash?”

"It would be convenient if we could put them down like animals. Fortunately, they die like anything else.”

Trevelyan stepped away from him. He went back to the first corpse and turned it on its back. His hands slid down into the creases of the armor. He came up with a small vial of lyrium and he slid it into an inside pocket of his duster. Then he tugged the Templar’s boots off and shook them out. A small pouch fell in the dirt. Trevelyan picked it up, shook it near his ear and ran it under his nose. Whatever was in it seemed to satisfy him, and he tucked it in the same pocket as the vial.

So it went with the other two dead. Trevelyan fleeced them all. Coin, lyrium, and small pouches alike went into his pockets, as did personal mementos.

On the last Templar, Trevleyan paused. He pulled a square of parchement from the dead man’s pocket. Shaking it out, he unfolded it and began to read.

“A letter to his sweetheart?” Dorian sincerely hoped so. He wasn’t sure to be gratified or unnerved that some part of him delighted in the thought of the dead man’s loved one wailing over him.

“No.” Trevelyan’s eyes scanned the note. “It’s orders from his cell. All the way from Starkhaven, from the look of him.”

“You can tell that?”

"Starkhaven Templars tie their tabards a different way. They're also the only school that trains with a short bow.”

Trevelyan, he remembered with new appreciation, was an apostate. Not a wayward rebel Circle mage, but a different beast entirely. Dorian barely had a notion of what "apostate" meant, other than “unwashed, untrained, and uncouth,” but only one of those seemed to be true, in Trevelyan’s case. The man really did smell like a bear pelt.

But between Solas and the Herald, he was starting to think that perhaps he knew even less about these southern mages than he did the Templars.

“You should have trained with one of the Inquisition knights before they sent you out here,” said Trevelyan.

“Assuming I ever walk again, I’ll be sure to get right on that.” The thought of getting the magic punched out of him again was not an appealing one. “Do you have a recommendation?”

“Ser Eisley,” said Trevelyan. He helped Dorian up and let him lean against him. “He uses the Verdier style that they teach in most academies. And he’s lyrium-addled, so he won’t feel it if you hit him harder than you need to.”

Dorian studied the man beside him with a slight chill. “You really have killed a lot of these people, haven’t you?”

"Only the ones who’ve tried to kill me,” said Trevleyan. “So yes.”

"It must be fascinating to be an apostate.”

Trevelyan shifted his weight. “Can think of worse things.”

"Where I come from, we call that being a free man,” said Dorian.

Trevelyan regarded him. He was gaunt, hairless, and his lips always seemed to be on the edge of a smile, as if he knew something you didn't. It was infuriating, and intriguing. “Welcome to the South.”

Dorian let himself be half-carried, half-dragged back to their comrades, the Herald of Andraste's arm around his waist the whole time. _Indeed_.


End file.
